Mbeki doesn’t want to admit to mistakes

This week the nation was blessed with fresh insights from the mind of venerable elder statesman and former president Thabo Mbeki. Addressing a conference of the SA Association of Public Administration and Management, he bemoaned a “steep decline” in the capability, authority and credibility of the state.

He began quoting the assessment of the humble journalist Pieter du Toit, who recently observed that “the economy is shrinking ... our collapsing electricity parastatal is causing untold national harm, infrastructure across the land is failing”. Rampant criminality and corruption, the scribe noted, accompany poor health and educational outcomes.

The veteran philosopher states man ventured that“none of us would contest this characterisation of SA ... Many of the metrics show that our country is in steep decline!”

Mbeki is not the most dreadful postapartheid president Jacob Zuma, after all, presents stiff competition. Nonetheless, it is sensible to check his claims against “the metrics” that now, in his twilight years, he claims to favour.

Educational outcomes in SA have been dismal across the entire postapartheid period, but they were improving in recent years, at least until the Covid-19 pandemic intervened.

Life expectancy, often used as a proxy for health outcomes, fell from 63 in 1990 to 54 in 2005. This was primarily due to the HIV/Aids pandemic and the failure of a certain president to address it. Once Mbeki was removed from office, life expectancy resumed its upward trend and it was back to 66 before Covid struck.

The most widely used metric of social outcomes is the UN’s human development index. This measures the knowledge, health and available resources of populations around the world to see if countries are improving and how they compare with one another: 1 is good and 0 is bad. SA’s index rose from a miserable 0.65 when Mbeki was kicked out to 0.74 in 2019.

Mbeki is on firmer ground when he bewails the damage caused to SA by the Eskom debacle.

He forgets, however, that it was the looting frenzy triggered by his ANC faction’s funding vehicle, Chancellor House, that was the initiator of this crisis. All this happened so that Mbeki’s crowd would have the resources to run the country from Luthuli House once the president’s two terms were up.

Is there a general collapse of state capability?

The World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, however imperfect, have been used to measure key dimensions of governance in more than 200 countries since 2002. They confirm that things are hardly rosy for SA.

There is support for claims about growing levels of violence and instability. Corruption is getting worse; indeed, we may soon catch up with India and Brazil. Broad government effectiveness, regulatory quality and the rule of law are all sliding somewhat from quite high levels, but SA remains in the middle of the pack of middleincome countries.

There are deeply concerning trends and there is no room for complacency. But there are no grounds for hysteria. Pragmatic solutions that involve the private sector and voluntary organisations should be encouraged, even if we must always remain alert to the dangers of deepening inequality.

SA is not so different from other middle-income countries in what is a difficult world. The state has not collapsed, and we have not yet seen any terminal decline in its popular legitimacy.

Mbeki’s problem is that he does not want to admit that he made mistakes. He also dislikes the idea that SA citizens or opposition parties might solve the society’s problems. In “political science”, he claims, “this is characterised as counterrevolution!”

Only a failed president who studied political science at the International Lenin School in Moscow half a century ago could make this claim.

For the rest of us this is called democracy.